Finally got round to seeing Jonathan Glazer's film 'Birth', which I arrived at after watching John Duigan's intriguing 'Lawn Dogs' and it's paedophilic undercurrent (a long story...).
'Birth' explores the relationship between Anna (Nicole Kidman) and a 10 year old boy (Cameron Bright) who turns up out of nowhere, claiming to be her dead husband, Sean. The grown-up Sean had died suddenly 10 years earlier, and Anna is now on the point of marriage to a new man, Joseph (Danny Huston). The young Sean's arrival at the door of their upper-middle class New York appartment and his insistance that Anna should not marry her new partner throws the couple's life into progressive chaos. Despite the advice of those around her, the mysterious claims of the child and his knowledge of her past marriage begin to play on Anna's mind and she slowly succumbs to the idea that the young Sean may well be her late husband.
This descent into the irrational, or more over into that no-man's-land between irrationality and the rational, is subtly portrayed by the film's use of careful ambiguity and understatement. While a crisis of the psyche may not be anything new for women in Cinema, the nature of Anna's turmoil moves the film into a quagmire of female morality that few films have sought to address: female desire and young boys. (As far as I remember...if anyone can think of similar instances in film or books, please let me know!) This moral passage or crossing is powerfully rendered by a long cinematic gaze at Anna's face as she sits at a performance of Wagner's Die Walküre (the mise-en-abime love plot of which obviously has its own moral transgression...)
The real subject matter is the utterly destructive power of grief and mourning, but clearly it is their transgressive power that the film concentrates on. Obviously, the transformation of Anna's latent grief into desire is made all the more disturbing by its fixation on a 10 year old boy - a child Anna believes she can seriously run away with and marry once he is old enough. In some ways this is almost a gender inversion of Nabokov's flight with his female nymphet, where he writes in 'Lolita':
"Between the age limits of nine and fourteen there occur maidens who, to certain bewitched travelers, twice or many times older than they, reveal their nature, which is not human, but nymphic (that is, demoniac); and these chosen creatures I propose designate as "nymphets."
While the outstanding Cameron Bright plays Sean as a young child so suitably ambiguous and unsettling, in his other worldliness, he could almost be auditioning for 'The Omen', there is something in his reserved 'maturity' that begs the question if this is a male role reversal of the nymphet. When Anna sits in a bar with Sean, asking him about how he will fulfil her needs, his quiet response, that he knows about that, leaves the viewer in a horribly ambiguous position as to the origins of his knowledge (reincarnation, boyhood fantasy or previous maternal abuse?).
It is here that the wonderful ambiguity of the film begins to cause problems. For what is the most disturbing, for me at any rate, is the presentation of the child Sean in the film, and the role he was seen to play as the agent of Anna's moral transgression. If Anna eventually succumbs to the idea that Sean is her husband, it is the child who is portrayed throughout the film as the instigator of her emotional turmoil. It is the child who pursues Anna, it is he who insists he is her husband, and it is he who eventually, at the film's resolution, receives treatment for his 'problem'. Yet the idea of this boy's desire for an adult is never really explored by the film itself. The young Sean's 'desire' seems to become a mere plot mechanism to serve other ends. Therein, for me, lies the most disturbing layer of the film: the potential representation of children as not only complicit but active manipulators of adult desire (an excuse used apparently by many paedophiles in defence of their activities). Despite the film's beautiful use of ambiguity, and however compelling the film, this might be one aspect that just sits a little too heavy for some.
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